With our wonderful wedding reception last weekend now in our rear-view mirror, Christine and I now turn our sights to some fun over in Western Asia, in the lovely resort town of Bodrum in Türkiye along the northeastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea. Her high school friend, Damla, is Turkish and lives with her family in the capitol city of Ankara, which Christine has visited a few times. The stars aligned this year though, as Damla and her family invited us to join them in their annual summer holiday in Bodrum.

The last time I was in Türkiye was in 2015, when the “Camel Family” consisting of my friends Branden, Caitlin, and Kate had a couple nights of layover in Istanbul on our way to Jordan. Beyond reserving an AirBnB for a couple nights, we didn’t even put any thought into that stop in our journey – we took for granted that we’d get a cheap visa at the airport (Visa on Arrival, or VOA) and be in and out without any fuss. It’s difficult to remember exactly but I think the visa was $30 per person.

That was seven years ago. As Christine was doing research on our trip last week, she told me that we’d “better get our e-Visas ahead of time, and it looks like people on the internet are saying it’s not an easy process.” Besides having laughably out-of-date information (the official Turkish FAQ website on e-Visas quotes prices from 2014 in the form of a downloadable PDF – who is running their I.T. department???) we repeatedly had issues even getting the site to load in several browsers.

I finally had some luck getting the site to function long enough to input all the relevant information, receive the confirmation email with a link to the payment site and… that’s when the real trouble started. Every credit card we had, we tried putting into the payment site, the little “attempting to process payment” window showed up, but within a minute, it would error out with one word: “Sorry” appearing on the screen. Verbose error messages from a government e-Visa website? Of course not, don’t be silly.

Immediately, of course, we started doing web searches for any way around this problem. Almost like it was waiting for us to search for the phrase “turkish evisa payment not working”, we got a link to this company’s blog post, Atlys.com, which has a totally real and not at all paid-off sounding writer saying how he and his wife were frustrated with the same problem as us, but in the end, Atlys.com was the “easy way” to get their Turkish visas.

Of course, the totally real author, “Andrew” doesn’t mention that Atlys will, of course, charge you a service fee of $15 per visa for their part. So, if

• paying a service fee that equates to almost an extra third of the cost of the visa itself
  
• needing to make another account, and being forced to install a smartphone app just to get a visa rather than using a desktop website

doesn’t leave a bad taste in your mouth, then read no further – I’m sure Atlys would love to have your money!

But I’m an I.T. guy. Both of those bullet points left me nonplussed. We fix problems, and we try to do it as cheaply as possible. (it keeps the bosses happy when we save them money, after all!). So what’s a “free” way (i.e. – no service fees. You’ll still have to pay for your actual visas themselves, of course) to deal with this e-Visa website?

Our wedding last November was planned and carried out in such a whirlwind, about five weeks of planning, that comparatively speaking, giving ourselves six months to organize last weekend’s reception felt almost like overkill. But then we remembered that our wedding only hosted 20 people, and this reception was being thrown for almost a hundred, and we felt very thankful that we had given ourselves so much time.

In the end, everything came together perfectly, especially thanks to our parents, and friends Blair & Aurelia, who stayed at the condo with us the day beforehand to help with last-minute decorating decisions and providing transport to boxes upon boxes of said decorations to Tenney Park here in Madison, where we had reserved its beautiful pavilion all the way back last December. Camel siblings Branden & Caitlin provided some excellent wine, which was perfectly paired to the three types of picnic-style sandwiches that we selected from Gaylord Catering.

Christine & I had joked about this for years, half-seriously, about doing the Austin Powers dance (mostly based off of the intro to Austin Powers 3) but about two months ago, entirely in secret, we started choreographing and designing a dance to do at the reception. We decided on our moves solely off of looking up what other people had put on the internet, discarding 80% of what we found as “not suitable for people as old and stiff-jointed as we are” and melding the rest into a silly 1.5 minute dance. We figured the other half of the song could have the rest of our guests join us – and they did!

Without further ado, here we are, dancing up a storm. Remember, despite my ~4 years in show choir(s) more than a decade ago, neither of us have any real dance experience, and definitely not any experience choreographing dances! In the middle of it, you might notice our simple “salsa dance” step in there, as an homage to our year in Panama back in 2017-2018.

About an hour later (plenty of time for me to lose my voice due to happy, and perhaps-too-much-wine-drinking, excitement) Christine pulled out our second prepared duo act – one of her favorite songs, L-O-V-E by Nat King Cole, except to work with our vocal range, she found an arrangement by Nat’s daughter, Natalie Cole, and gave that to our DJ, Tony Cenite. (Great guy, by the way – he didn’t have a lot of reviews online, but we took a chance on him and we’re glad we did) Here it is below! Sure our voices aren’t in the best singing shape, but it was still a lot of fun.

The following morning, we also hosted a tour of the nearby Olbrich Botanical Gardens for about a dozen of our family & friends, followed by a hosted brunch at the Breakwater restaurant, over down by where Lake Monona flows into the Yahara river and continues on its journey to the next lake in the watershed. It was great to see so many people, and with some sadness that there were a few people who we really wanted to attend, that couldn’t make it for pandemic-related reasons, it was almost like we hadn’t needed to spend the past two years in CoViD hibernation. Christine & I have been extremely lucky to not have lost any close relatives to the virus – even her 94 year old grandmother!

The one bad piece of luck for the weekend at least turned out to be slightly amusing. Sunday morning, about 10 minutes before Christine & I were to drive off to Olbrich, I had just been commenting on how well Saturday’s reception had gone to my parents in law. They teased me about saying something like that, and I snorted that I didn’t believe in luck. Moments later, Christine calls from the bathroom “oh no! oh god! what’s going on?!” I rushed in to see water spraying from our beloved washlet, that we bought and installed just days before the pandemic, and pooling on the floor. I rushed to the shutoff valve on the wall and turned it off, but not before at least a couple gallons had made it onto the floor. The downstairs neighbor appeared a few minutes later, politely but seriously concerned that water was pouring out of her ceiling vent fan in her bathroom, right below ours. In the end, it could have been far worse – it looked like the pressure in the washlet’s water tank had caused a bit of the plastic casing to explode off when Christine pressed the ‘wash’ button. I just had to laugh (wryly) at the timing of the explosion just as I said I didn’t believe in luck.

Technical note, ignore if you don’t care about tech stuff: These two videos are using a new open-source, royalty-free codec called AV1 that I’m pretty excited about. They should play back in pretty much every browser, except Apple’s Safari. (Get with the times please, Apple) I encoded a separate, slightly-lower quality version of each video and embedded it in such a way that it should only load the lower-quality file if it detects an iPad, iPhone, or the Safari mac browser. To watch the superior file, use any other browser. Please let me know if you have any feedback or issues.

Another excuse to go to Mexico! Christine and I have been several times before, but this is the first time we’ve had a honeymoon. Over the past several months we’d been looking around for places to travel to while she had her Christmas break, but thanks to COVID, Mexico was an easy thing to settle on – namely due to the low prices (we got tickets for $187 apiece round trip) and the lack of a mandatory 14-day quarantine. We want to go visit my foreign exchange sister Farah in South Korea, but the quarantine they require pretty much kills any chance of a trip for pleasure. Which to be honest, is probably as it should be during a global pandemic.

While Christine had been to the Yucatan peninsula twice before, this was my first visit. While the temperature hasn’t been too bad in Wisconsin thus far, it was still nice to get to tropical climates. After arriving at the Cancun airport, we had initially planned to take the 5 dollar (approximately) “ADO” branded bus from the airport past the “Zona Hotelera,” the huge North-South running strip of gorgeous beach running along the eastern coast of the Mexican state of Quintana Roo, to get to Central Cancun, where we had our first night’s hotel before heading on to the Yucatan State Capitol of Merida. However, despite the bus company’s website stating that buses would run until 11:45 at night and us stepping out into the humid air at 11pm, the taxi drivers were more than happy to inform us that the buses had stopped for the evening, and “you are at our mercy” was not stated, but subtly implied.

We knew the Mexican cartels control the transport system around Cancun (Uber and other ride-share systems simply do not exist in Cancun, like they do in other parts of Mexico, due to High Chances of Messy Decapitation) so we didn’t bother arguing too much. We took our “private” taxi for $15 per person up to Central, although the hustlers at the taxi center suddenly crammed another 3 backpacking young people into our cab (all English speakers from Europe, who told us they were also told they were getting a “private” taxi for $15 each) and necessitated several long waits in heavy traffic along the Hotel Zone.

Our first night’s stay was quiet and relaxing in an “eco-hotel” – a refreshing return to one of my favorite aspects of Mexican and Spanish (and Arabic, let’s be honest – thanks Moors!) architecture, the unassuming front of the building hiding a gorgeously appointed interior courtyard with fountains and gardens everywhere. A quick foot-dip in the pool and breakfast, and we were on to the central bus station of Cancun (we had chosen the hotel because it was a 5 minute walk to the bus station) and a 3 hour ride to Merida.

Our hotel in Merida was called the Mission of Friar Diego. I had never heard of this Spanish fellow, but the stately convent-converted-to-hotel had lots of helpful plaques, artwork, statues, and signs to give some history. Apparently several hundred years ago he performed an “act of faith” for the Mayan people, by helpfully burning thousands of religious books and objects to better focus their attention on his god. He was later granted the Bishopric of the region by the Spanish crown for this action. Fast forward to now, and I’m not entirely sure how the hotel’s owners were presenting this guy; as neutrally as possible, it seemed. The room was nice though; having 2 foot thick stone walls really kept the place comfortably cool and quiet.

For our first day in Merida, a young Mestizo (Mayan/Spanish descended) man named Gus gave us a cooking class. We were joined a quartet of 20-something Germans, two brothers and their girlfriends on vacation. Gus freely admitted to us that this was his first time leading his class again in a year and a half since the pandemic began. He and his elderly aunt had run it out of her home for several years, but due to her advanced age he didn’t want to risk her health with guests, so we’d instead be using his friend Joachim’s kitchen.

Our previous Mexican cooking class experience in Oaxaca several years ago had begun in the local market, and Gus’s class was the same: the bustling central market does indeed seem to be a hallmark of Mexican culture. Throughout our time in Mexico, people did a great job of keeping their masks on, even outside in public – from what we could tell it was until recently mandated to wear masks even while outside, but that had been relaxed somewhat. 18 month habits die hard though, and it seemed 60-80% of people kept up the practice. Inside in the market, it was closer to 95-99% – which was good, because the aisles were tightly packed.

We saw lots of fresh hot sauce for sale, and surprising numbers of radishes. Proprietary and exotic blends of red, black, green, and brown spices, mixed with oil and water to make it a sticky and grainy paste, were sold in plastic bags. Most interesting to me was a rickety, almost steam-punk looking corn tortilla making machine in one stall – its owners would feed in the stone-ground cornmeal dough into a chute on the top, where it’d be flattened and exuded into a thin sheet on a drum underneath, where two disc blades sliced the sheet every 6 inches into two neat circles and recycled the excess back into the drum. The twin baby tortillas would drop onto a semi-circular grated conveyor belt which was precisely long enough to run the sets of twins under a long upper and lower burner, perfectly toasting them by the time they reached the end where the staff would scoop them up by the handful and place them directly into consumers’ waiting hands. The price was 20 pesos per kilo, which equals a little less than a dollar. And a kilo of small corn tortillas looked like about 60-80 – so yeah, people here eat a lot of tortillas!

Thanks to the pandemic, the government has set laws on the number of people that can be in taxis and rideshares – and no one can ride in the front seat next to the driver. So our group of 7 had to be split into three Ubers (no cartels here to stop the rideshare industry; Merida is known for being a relatively safe community in the peninsula) which Gus paid for in cash. The 20 minute ride across town cost the equivalent of about 2 USD.

We met Joachim at his home and beers were cracked open all around as we began to cook. One of the young German couples worked in the kitchen of a boutique hotel near the Baltic sea and industriously began perfectly dicing the tomatoes and onions exactly to Gus’s specifications. We made our own tortillas from masa corn flour Gus had on hand (we didn’t grind the kernels ourselves though!) in an aluminum die-cast mold. For some of the tortillas, we mixed in the finely diced leaves of a local Mayan herb, Chaya, into the dough before molding.

Well, we did it! After 10 years of dating, Christine and I got hitched last weekend on the 13th, surrounded by our closest friends and nuclear family. Our cooperative cohousing condo was kind enough to allow us to host the ceremony and lunch right at our building. It was lovely, and I wasn’t nervous at all, no sir. Happy to finally be hitched to my best friend.

We do wish the pandemic would have allowed us to do things indoors (it’s pretty chilly in Wisconsin in November) but it is what it is, and overall we have had a pretty easy time of the pandemic what with work-from-home schedules, and not losing any of our loved ones to the disease. While we all know friends and family that have gotten the virus, we’ve been lucky to not have had to say goodbye to anyone.

Sometime in summer 2022 we hope to have a larger (still outdoor, probably) reception and invite a lot more folks.

Honeymoon in Cancun next month!

Note: Please support website owners by subscribing to them, donating to their Patreons, etc, whenever you can. Don’t abuse this capability. Note the date of this post – July 1, 2020. This method might not work when you try this, but it (generally) works now.

A lot of websites talk about methods to circumvent website paywalls. It used to be that you could go into Private Mode (what Chrome calls Incognito mode) to circumvent a “number of articles read” counter, which used a cookie saved on your computer to track how much you’d viewed their site. As of 2020, many of the largest websites now block Private/Incognito mode browsers from viewing their content.

A newer method that some sites mention now is disabling Javascript. For a website which has a fancy “fade out the screen” animation covering the text you want to read, it’s almost certainly Javascript creating that animation. The webpage content is still loaded on that page, just behind the Javascript overlay.

All browsers have had the ability to disable Javascript entirely for decades. This is an easy thing to search for. But Javascript is useful, and you might want it turned on for most sites you visit, and only disable it on a site-by-site basis. Chromium-based browsers (like of course the famous Chrome, Opera, Brave, and the new Microsoft Edge (edgium) browser) have the ability to easily control Javascript’s activation per-site. For this demo, I’ll be using the Windows operating system, Brave Browser and WashingtonPost.com, and I’ve just selected a random non-Coronavirus article (because the Post gives away access to coronavirus-related stories for free. Please support quality journalism so they can keep doing this).

If you already use Chrome, you might consider checking out Brave. Brave is basically a super-charged version of Chrome that works the same way, except with better privacy protection (source). I still use Mozilla Firefox as my main browser, but Brave has replaced Chrome as my method of accessing Google-owned properties like Gmail, Youtube, Maps, etc. Heck, even Mozilla agrees that Brave is on their level when it comes to privacy (if not utility – which I agree with too – nothing beats Firefox for customization if you’re into that).

Remember though, you don’t need Brave. You just need a Chromium-based browser (here’s a list). If you’re like most people, you probably already have one: Google Chrome.

Let’s get started.

Note: The title is a little language joke to help me feel a little better about the somber mood that’s hovering over all of humanity recently. “Virii” is an incorrect plural of “virus” and despite its wrongness, I prefer it over “viruses” which, really, is just totes boring. Aren’t we glad we just have a single virus to deal with instead of virii?

In case someone is (hopefully) reading this decades from now and has no idea, the planet is currently in for a bit of a viral pandemic hysteria. SARS-COV-2, The Novel Coronavirus (I imagine an English virologist holding a monocle up and exclaiming “how novel!” as he looks through a quaint microscopic), and the resulting illness, COVID-19, is currently playing the bongos on people’s lungs and, kind of like HIV leads to AIDS, causing thousands of deaths every day due to complications like pneumonia.

As we all sit on our butts and read social media and news reports and, in my case, refreshing the USA pandemic Washington Post article every day at 6pm while nervously picking at my fingernails, I’ve seen brave-faced posts reminding us all that we’re part of a historical event now, and we should write about it for posterity. If all goes well and this pandemic burns itself out in a few months (or six months… or a year… etc) then our descendants might be curious about how we early 21st century internet-addicted dummies handled this mess.

Christine and I have both been working from home for over two weeks now. I last was in the office on Friday, March 13th. I can’t believe it, but I miss going into the office. I always wanted to work from home more, but 100% is just too much. At least I brought my 10 year old, coworker hand-me-down spider plant home to hang in my guest bedroom (i.e. “makeshift office”).

I feel really bad for Christine. She was supposed to go to Mexico with her mother from the 16th through 20th, but as the rumblings of upcoming doom got worse in late February, her mother decided not to go (she offered to transfer her plane ticket to me, which was very sweet of her). Christine and I initially thought about taking the trip (“how bad can this thing be? SARS and H1N1 weren’t nothing!”) but the rumblings turned into outright proclamations in early March. By the time the 16th arrived, my first working-from-home day, Christine admitted that it was probably a good thing that we cancelled – and it seems like most airlines are doing fairly okay by people in terms of cancellations and credits.